Thursday, 21 August 2014

This class is the most efficient way to uses multiple keys to map to a value. The best way to use this class is via the additional map-style methods. These provide get, containsKey, put and remove for individual keys which operate without extra object creation.

The additional methods are the main interface of this map. As such, you will not normally hold this map in a variable of type Map.

The normal map methods take in and return a MultiKey. If you try to use put() with any other object type a ClassCastException is thrown. If you try to use null as the key in put() a NullPointerException is thrown.

This map is implemented as a decorator of a AbstractHashedMap which enables extra behaviour to be added easily.

Note that IdentityMap and ReferenceIdentityMap are unsuitable for use as the key comparison would work on the whole MultiKey, not the elements within.

Note that MultiKeyMap is not synchronized and is not thread-safe. If you wish to use this map from multiple threads concurrently, you must use appropriate synchronization. This class may throw exceptions when accessed by concurrent threads without synchronization.

Apache Commons Collections to create a MultiKeyMap that will store two
keys with one corresponding value and then using MapIterator to walk
through the map.

MultiKeyMap keys are instances of MultiKey, which has a getKey(int index) method. There is also a getKeys() method which returns Object[].